Berlin

by Bea Setton

People always seem to trust philosophers.

I hoped that if I just lay there and waited, time would do its work quickly, and string together enough moments so that the terror of the present would end.

The worst thing about him was absolutely everything else.

Her hair looked unkempt and greasy, and she was wearing a low-cut top with faded jeans, and a pair of dirty red Converses. She looked fantastic.

The popcorn packet popped open with a belch of that sickly sweet cinema breath,

Even if I do nothing but continue this minimal existence, I thought, time will keep moving past me. Even if I remain as immobile as a paperweight, time will still stack up the days and pin the receipts of all of them to me until I find myself with a thick wad of them in my forties, and a hefty pile in my sixties. I’m sure they’ll add up to something that feels weighty and satisfying, and that I’ll feel rich at the end—no matter how impoverished my days actually were, I thought, as I dried the dishes.

I have always exploited my misfortunes for narrative purposes.

I looked like a broken umbrella.

My body didn’t really feel like my own, but like a haphazard collection of butcher’s cuts.

A carved wooden Buddha with closed eyes and an all-embracing smile sat upon a low teak table. He looked impassive and blissed-out, a kind of good-karma version of the concussed-looking downstairs neighbor.

I felt as if with each push of the pedals I was reeling in a big spool of fishing line, shortening the distance till we got to my bedroom, where I would find out if I had caught a merman or a trout.

Speaking German for me was such an act, such a mask, that I assumed that when Germans took off their clothes they’d revert to English like the rest of us.

I noticed all the horrible collaterals of human life and bunched them together to form a bouquet composed to exacerbate my hatred of the place.

I felt as if I were watching my own dissection, the good-humored doctor occasionally raising his scalpel to ask, Does that feel like your spleen, or the intestine?

For example, I had told Milosh that I was twenty-four, instead of twenty-six. I’d told him that I owned a pair of roller skates, that I have an American passport, and I don’t believe in God. These lies make no sense and make my life more complicated without really making me seem cooler or helping me achieve any of my goals. They are the appendix or the wisdom teeth of the lying world—painful, and totally redundant.