Berlin

by Bea Setton

All I was doing was telling her how she ought to react, and now she would feel a double failure: failure for not being able to hang on to a mediocre man, and failure for not having the appropriate independent liberated woman response to this loss.

I’m always looking down at myself, watching how my legs thrash about, and how the fish and weeds flow all around me.

It was only after I’d run and showered, when I felt I’d settled my debts,

I’d left M&M’s wrappers and a Nutella jar by the side of my bed, and I saw Officer Blondie register them as he scanned the room.

I didn’t realize that I knew this until I said it, but then I knew it with complete certainty.

Not because of what had happened to me—I already knew it was sort of darkly glamorous—but because it was just so embarrassing to call them in such an intense moment of vulnerability.

They just disappeared punctually. She did that for me, my mother, discreetly evacuating my greatest shames, which were also her own.

But souls are not recast with a change of decor. Of course I’d always known this, everyone does, but to live it again and again in each new city and flat, to perform varieties of the same exhausting choreography only to find myself in the same spot, hating myself in the mirror, was draining me of the last reserves of self-respect I had left.

felt a murmur of that old optimism rising within me. I was starting again. The tide was turning, a new chapter beginning.

Arriving at Gabriel’s reminded me of coming back into the circle of love after days of anonymity and indifference. I began to cry.

But at the same time, the stalking, window smashing, and break-in didn’t make me feel terrible about myself. There was something refreshing about bad things happening to me.

But I’d spoiled it all in my usual way: suck up, lie, ghost, repeat.

In Berlin, on the other hand, I was the innocent victim. None of the misfortunes were my fault.

I always look my best when I am ill, hungover, or exhausted. The tension slackens, and something in my face opens up.

Your German is incredibly good.”

Just thinking about her saying she doesnt remember much of the conversation and looking at what she does remember

I still feel proud of the incredible self-restraint I had demonstrated in not having immediately divulged the whole window-smashing-and-break-in story right off the bat. It went completely against my nature.

I have always exploited my misfortunes for narrative purposes. If you have to live through something horrible, you might as well turn shit to gold by telling a good story.

feels sensual and risqué to nourish our lusty bodies together.

He moved toward me with heartbreaking hesitancy, eyes dancing between my eyes and lips, checking that he’d read me right and that this was what I wanted.

Perhaps it was the way she spoke: she didn’t have an accent, exactly, but she sounded breathless, as if she were blowing the words out of her mouth like plumes of smoke. She smiled a lot, pursed her lips when she concentrated. She wasn’t particularly feminine; her beauty was not marked by any particularities of gender.

She smiled and nodded, as if to say, It’s okay, enjoy him. God, so strange, I thought. It must be part of some game of sexual provocation they played together.

I must confess that much of what I have just written is not true. It isn’t really what happened. I don’t mean the whole story is a lie—it is very nearly completely true. I’m referring only to the last chapter. Not all of it.

She is so funny

I’m not sure why I felt the need to lie.

That kind of self-denial is nearly a skill. No one would ever know I spent all day thinking about and avoiding food, and was mostly alone. I didn’t even truly know it. An act of vigilante justice may have forced me to wake up.

“Yeah,” I said. “I try.” Of course, I wasn’t really trying. My whole life was a kind of montage for a rescue scene. I wanted someone to save me from my dysfunctional self.

knee. I pulled his hand off me and his expression changed. For a brief, absurd moment, I thought he had felt the graze of my unwaxed stubble on my knee, and that he was grimacing in disgust,

I wasn’t attracted to him, but I still wanted him to be attracted to me.

He gazed up at me, looking stranger than ever. He smiled faintly and put his finger to his lips, as if shushing a child. As if we shared a nasty secret.

Did he actually do this

know so much about her now that it is hard to whittle it down to the bare facts I learned on the day I met her.

greasy meat slowly rotating in the background. I spoke much more than Milosh did that evening, and I would speak much more than him every time we were together, except for the last time.

searching for a cue to regulate my own reaction, because I trust their response more than my own.

Not that I dislike sex completely. I do enjoy some aspects of it. I want to feel like an object of desire. I want to feel wanted, essentially. It gives me a kick to think of myself as being someone’s “lover.” I just don’t like it while it is actually happening. I feel that way about a lot of things, as a matter of fact—running, going to the dentist, visiting relatives. I’m glad when it’s over, but I like knowing I’ve done it.

I was in mortal terror of Gabriel catching me eating his food at three a.m. I was in mortal terror of him realizing the food was missing. I was in mortal terror of myself, my rabid hunger, what it would do to my body. Yet despite this mortal terror, I was unable to put a stop to it.

When she asked if I could spare some change, I didn’t even bother to look at her, I just shook my head very slightly to make it clear that I had been in Berlin long enough to be hardened to her piteous state.

We walked only a short while, past Berghain to a small park, and sat, talking and propping elbows on knees, resting heads on shoulders, indifferent to which limb belonged to whom, making common property of our bodies.

The memories I have of us are no better than how it really was. We were so sweet together, so complicit, in each other’s pockets.

“You are the strangest and funniest person I’ve ever met. I’ll miss you. Please look after yourself.”

Of course Callum had a boyfriend. I was so self-centered that it never would have occurred to me that I was not the object of desire, that maybe he genuinely just wanted to be my friend.

I was feeling ill at ease in Cass’s flat. I’d infected the place with my own atmosphere and my unpleasant habits. The place was no longer an escape from myself, but a kind of landscape of my own mind: stained sheets, food wrappers stuffed in unlikely places, stray hairs everywhere, sticky finger marks on the fridge and light switches.

It wasn’t that I wished something worse had happened—of course not—but I expected my suffering to feel redemptive in some way. I thought life was meant to be meaningful, even when it was hard. I wanted to tell her that I was unhappy, but that my unhappiness had no noble cause, and was nearly entirely of my own making. It was slow, insidious self-destruction.

Whereas I saw everything in my life as something that could be optimized: Was Berlin really the best city? Was this the best part of town, was this the thinnest I could be, were these the coolest friends I could hope to have? Milosh reflexively, unthinkingly did what I find hardest: He accepted reality with ease and grace. He committed to and invested in his real life without fantasizing about the one he ought to be living.

Milosh’s description of Hedvig’s experience of stalking made me feel embarrassed that I’d brought it up. Maybe what Grausam did wasn’t so bad. Perhaps I was exaggerating. I changed the subject. He ordered a slice of the Black Forest cake, and let me eat the maraschino cherries. Next time the subject of Richard Grausam came up, we would be sitting in a police station.

Would this keep happening, wherever I went? I don’t know if I can survive this. I don’t have it in me. Life is meant to test you, but this was too much. I wasn’t up to this. Not madness yet, but looming madness.

Don’t demand “truth” now, when we both know that you were happy to accept my lies when they made your life easy.

I’ve lied because I found people’s desire to know the truth invasive and their assumption I would tell the truth presumptive. People think they are entitled to honest answers, but I’ve never been very honest because I don’t want to be depressing.

They are good examples of the second kind of lies I told: the straight-out manipulative kind.

While I understood that my behavior made me a good candidate for a psychiatric diagnosis, I was not willing to give up the advantages that these habits procured for me.

It felt like memory, not fantasy. I wasn’t brave enough for acts of vigilante justice or true revenge. But self-destruction was much easier.

He didn’t have to be mine; knowing he existed was enough.

I’d just stewed in the fetid air of my own bell jar.